Getting angry. That’s the first word that comes to mind after reading Eric Vuillard’s latest story, Tusquets. I probably felt the same way when I read Hitler’s most famous book, The Order of the Day (Goncourt Prize 2017), which chronicles the little-known episodes of his rise to power. Or maybe not, because we underestimate the horrors of Nazism. And our gaze is even more fierce to witness the great crimes committed by the European democracies, in this case the French Republic, in its colonies.
Jealousy, healthy jealousy, is the other emotion that Vuillard’s text evokes in me. It is so perfectly written that the reader will think of Stefan Zweig’s best historical reenactments. Starting with the more ironic title. General Henri Navarre’s order in 1953 is to seek an honorable exit for France from the Indochina War. There were hundreds of thousands of victims among Vietnamese separatists, as well as in the French colonial army, whose cannon fodder was “Arabs, Vietnamese, and blacks.” Then came the Americans, who had come to offer the French two atomic bombs to stay. However, Vuillard is not interested in obscene war shows. The horror that tells us is not Coppola’s Apocalypse Now or Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, both works that do not stop beating our brains as persistently as the rattle of a machine gun.
No, it’s what goes on behind the scenes of the battle scene that interests Vuillard. What matters to him is what happens between the comfortable seats of Parliament or on the soft carpets of the governing boards. And the terrible truth that the author shows us is that of the high bourgeoisie who, through Parliament, promoted a war they knew was lost. But they multiplied their fortunes by wrapping themselves in the tricolor flag, knowing how to exploit and speculating with death. Vuillard is an internal high-bourgeoisie, “more permissive than the Koran in matters of arranged marriage,” who mocks as long as they do business, as in the Michelins example.
I refrain from explaining what this story says about Michelin and latex farms in Vietnam. My view of what lies behind the famous gastronomy guide and the chubby baby has changed. I will only remember something Marguerite Duras wrote in A Dam Against the Pacific (1950): “The latex was flowing. Blood too. But only latex was valuable. It’s a terrible truth.